Large-scale generation of electric power based on a freely-available, essentially inexhaustible natural resource, such as solar irradiance, continues progressing as an attractive modality for clean and efficient generation of electric power.
The weather-induced variability of the natural resource (e.g., due to cloud coverage variability in the case of solar irradiance) may cause challenges at various levels, such as at a component level, at a subsystem level, at a distribution level as well as on the larger power grid.
A sequence of images (e.g., sky images), as may be acquired by an image acquisition device at a given location of a field, may, for example, be processed to predict motion of a cloud, which may be used to predict occurrence of a solar obscuration event at the given location. Thus, one may effectively predict the occurrence of a solar obscuration event at the given location of the image acquisition device, but not at any arbitrary location on the field, which may involve a relatively large surface area. Accordingly, there is a need for an improved sky imaging apparatus and method.